Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/170



hero now had left Varnish, and Cynthia was gone out of town; so that he was to begin the world again. And the next fancy he took into his head, was to dress himself in a mean habit, take an ordinary lodging, and go amongst the lower sort of people, and see what he could make of them. He went from house to house for a whole month; for as he was now got amongst a class of people who had not had the advantages from education which teach men the way of artfully disguising their dispositions, whilst he lived with them, he never imagined he had met with anything he could esteem. For mercenary views there were so immediately perceptible in everything they all said or did, that he met with fewer disappointments in this way than in any other. This gave him but a melancholy prospect; for he thought, if a disposition was naturally good, it would appear as well in the lowest as in the highest station.

As he was sitting one evening revolving these things in his mind, he suddenly heard a great scolding, in a female voice, over his head; which was so shrill, and continued so long in one tone, that it gave him a curiosity to know the meaning of it. He went up stairs into a garret, where he saw a most moving scene. There lay on a bed (or rather on a parcel of rags patched together, to which the mistress of the house chose to give the name of a bed) a young man, looking as pale as death, with his eyes sunk in his head, and hardly able to breathe, covered with half a dirty rug, which would scarce come round him. On one side of him sat, holding him by the hand, a young woman, in an uldold [sic] silk